Chữ Nôm (, ) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters created using a variety of methods, including phono-semantic compounds. This composite script was therefore highly complex and was accessible to the less than five percent of the Vietnamese population who had mastered written Chinese.
Although all formal writing in Vietnam was done in Classical Chinese until the early 20th century (except for two brief interludes), between the 15th and 19th centuries some Vietnamese literati used chữ Nôm to create popular works in the vernacular, many in verse. One of the best-known pieces of Vietnamese literature, The Tale of Kiều, was written in chữ Nôm by Nguyễn Du.
The Vietnamese alphabet created by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, with the earliest known usage occurring in the 17th century, replaced chữ Nôm as the preferred way to record Vietnamese literature from the 1920s. While Chinese characters are still used for decorative, historic and ceremonial value, chữ Nôm has fallen out of mainstream use in modern Vietnam. In the 21st century, chữ Nôm is being used in Vietnam for historical and liturgical purposes. The Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies at Hanoi is the main research centre for pre-modern texts from Vietnam, both Chinese-language texts written in Chinese characters () and Vietnamese-language texts in chữ Nôm.
Etymology The Vietnamese word 'character' is derived from the Middle Chinese word , meaning '[Chinese] character'. The word 'Southern' is derived from the Middle Chinese word , meaning 'south'. It could also be based on the dialectal pronunciation from the South Central dialects (most notably in the name of province of Quảng Nam, known locally as Quảng Nôm).
There are many ways to write the name in chữ Nôm characters. The word may be written as , , , , , , , or , while is written as .
Terminology
is the logographic writing system of the Vietnamese language. It is based on the Chinese writing system but adds a large number of new characters to make it fit the Vietnamese language. Common historical terms for chữ Nôm were (, 'national sound') and (, 'national language').
In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called ( 'Han characters'), ( 'Confucian characters', due to the connection with Confucianism) and uncommonly as ( 'Han characters'). Hán văn () refers to literature written in Literary Chinese.
The term ( 'Han and chữ Nôm characters') in Vietnamese designates the whole body of premodern written materials from Vietnam, either written in Chinese () or in Vietnamese ().Asian research trends: a humanities and social science review – No 8 to 10 – Page 140 Yunesuko Higashi Ajia Bunka Kenkyū Sentā (Tokyo, Japan) – 1998 "Most of the source materials from premodern Vietnam are written in Chinese, obviously using Chinese characters; however, a portion of the literary genre is written in Vietnamese, using chu nom. Therefore, han nom is the term designating the whole body of premodern written materials.." Hán and Nôm could also be found in the same document side by side,Vietnam Courier 1984 Vol20/21 Page 63 "Altogether about 15,000 books in Han, Nom and Han—Nom have been collected. These books include royal certificates granted to deities, stories and records of deities, clan histories, family genealogies, records of customs, land registers, ..." for example, in the case of translations of books on Chinese medicine.Khắc Mạnh Trịnh, Nghiên cứu chữ Nôm: Kỷ yếu Hội nghị Quốc tế về chữ Nôm Viện nghiên cứu Hán Nôm (Vietnam), Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation – 2006 "The Di sản Hán Nôm notes 366 entries which are solely on either medicine or pharmacy; of these 186 are written in Chinese, 50 in Nôm, and 130 in a mixture of the two scripts. Many of these entries ... Vietnam were written in either Nôm or Hán-Nôm rather than in 'pure' Chinese. My initial impression was that the percentage of texts written in Nôm was even higher. This is because for the particular medical subject I wished to investigate-smallpox-the percentage of texts written in Nom or Hán-Nôm is even higher than is the percentage of texts in Nôm and Hán-Nôm for general medical and pharmaceutical .." The Buddhist history Cổ Châu Pháp Vân phật bản hạnh ngữ lục (1752) gives the story of early Buddhism in Vietnam both in Hán script and in a parallel Nôm translation.Wynn Wilcox Vietnam and the West: New Approaches 2010– Page 31 "At least one Buddhist text, the Cổ Châu Pháp Vân phật bản hạnh ngữ lục (CCPVP), preserves a story in Hán script about the early years of Buddhist influence in Vietnam and gives a parallel Nôm translation." The Jesuit Girolamo Maiorica (1605–1656) had also used parallel Hán and Nôm texts.
The term ( 'national language script') refers to the Vietnamese alphabet in current use, but was used to refer to chữ Nôm before the Vietnamese alphabet was widely used.
History
Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han dynasty conquered Nanyue in 111 BC. Independence was achieved after the Battle of Bạch Đằng in 938, but Literary Chinese was adopted for official purposes in 1010. For most of the period up to the early 20th century, formal writing was indistinguishable from contemporaneous classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, and Japan.: "Because the Chinese characters were pronounced according to Vietnamese preferences, and because certain stylistic modifications occurred over time, later scholars came to refer to a hybrid "Sino-Vietnamese" (Han-Viet) language. However, there would seem to be no more justification for this term than for a fifteenth-century "Latin-English" versus the Latin written contemporaneously in Rome."
Vietnamese scholars were thus intimately familiar with Chinese writing. In order to record their native language, they applied the structural principles of Chinese characters to develop chữ Nôm. The new script was mostly used to record folk songs and for other popular literature. Vietnamese written in chữ Nôm briefly replaced Chinese for official purposes under the Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) and under the Tây Sơn (1778–1802), but in both cases this was swiftly reversed.
Early development
The use of Chinese characters to transcribe the Vietnamese language can be traced to an inscription with the two characters "", as part of the posthumous title of Phùng Hưng, a national hero who succeeded in briefly expelling the Chinese in the late 8th century. The two characters have literal Chinese meanings 'cloth' and 'cover', which make no sense in this context. They have thus been interpreted as a phonetic transcription, via their Middle Chinese pronunciations , of a Vietnamese phrase, either 'great king', or 'father and mother' (of the people).Keith Weller Taylor The Birth of Vietnam 1976 – Page 220 "The earliest example of Vietnamese character writing, as we have noted earlier, is for the words bo and cai in the posthumous title given to Phung Hung."
After Vietnam established its independence from China in the 10th century, Đinh Bộ Lĩnh (r. 968–979), the founder of the Đinh dynasty, named the country . The first and third Chinese characters mean 'great' and 'Viet'. The second character was often used to transcribe non-Chinese terms and names phonetically. In this context, is an obsolete Vietnamese word for 'big'.
The oldest surviving inscription using Chinese characters to transcribe Vietnamese names is on a stele at the Báo Ân pagoda in Tháp Miếu village (Phúc Yên, Vĩnh Phúc province). The inscription, re-engraved in the 18th century from an original dating from 1209, is written in Chinese but includes names of 21 people and villages written in an early form of Nôm. Another stele at Hộ Thành Sơn in Ninh Bình Province (1343) is reported as listing 20 villages.Laurence C. Thompson A Vietnamese Reference Grammar 1987 Page 53 "This stele at Ho-thành-sơn is the earliest irrefutable piece of evidence of this writing system, which is called in Vietnamese chữ nôm (chu 'written word', nom 'popular language'), probably ultimately related to nam 'south'-note that the ..."
Trần Nhân Tông (r. 1278–1293) ordered that Nôm be used to communicate his proclamations to the people. The first literary writing in Vietnamese is said to have been an incantation in verse composed in 1282 by the Minister of Justice Nguyễn Thuyên and thrown into the Red River to expel a menacing crocodile. Four poems written in Nom from the Tran dynasty, two by Trần Nhân Tông and one each by Huyền Quang and Mạc Đĩnh Chi, were collected and published in 1805.
The Nôm text ('Sūtra explained by the Buddha on the Great Repayment of the Heavy Debt to Parents') was printed around 1730, but conspicuously avoids the character , suggesting that it was written (or copied) during the reign of Lê Lợi (1428–1433) (see ). Based on archaic features of the text compared with the Tran dynasty poems, including an exceptional number of words with initial consonant clusters written with pairs of characters, some scholars suggest that it is a copy of an earlier original, perhaps as early as the 12th century.
Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) and Ming conquest (1407–1427)
During the seven years of the Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) Classical Chinese was discouraged in favor of vernacular Vietnamese written in Nôm, which became the official script. The emperor Hồ Quý Ly even ordered the translation of the Book of Documents into Nôm and pushed for reinterpretation of Confucian thoughts in his book Minh đạo. These efforts were reversed with the fall of the Hồ and Chinese conquest of 1407, lasting twenty years, during which use of the vernacular language and script were suppressed.: "An exception was during the brief Hồ dynasty (1400–07), when Chinese was abolished and chữ Nôm became the official script, but the subsequent Chinese invasion and twenty-year occupation put an end to that (Helmut Martin 1982:34)."
During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam, chữ Nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were thoroughly destroyed; as a result the earliest surviving texts of chữ Nôm post-date the occupation.Mark W. McLeod, Thi Dieu Nguyen Culture and Customs of Vietnam 2001 Page 68 – "In part because of the ravages of the Ming occupation — the invaders destroyed or removed many Viet texts and the blocks for printing them — the earliest body of nom texts that we have dates from the early post-occupation era ..."
15th to 19th centuries
Chữ Nôm was not reinstated as the official script after the demise of the Hồ dynasty and restoration of Viet rule. Very few extant vernacular texts in Nôm predate the 15th century and even many later texts in Nôm were translations or rewritings of works in Chinese. During the 15th and 16th centuries, reformist governments translated Chinese Classics into Nôm, but these translations have not survived due to being seen as subversive by successive governments. As a result of its marginalized nature and lack of institutional backing, chữ Nôm was used as a medium for social protest during the Lê dynasty (1428–1789), leading to its banning in 1663, 1718, and 1760.